The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  Looking at Adam, her guard and imprisoner, Lainey felt, before the letdown, a rage at how extraneous he was, and at herself, for what she’d done had given him a reason to stand there, watching over them, when he should not be anywhere near. She could recall feeling this way sometimes before what happened, too, when he stood near the glider, to bring her water, or just be near, how she would have the urge to bat him away, how confounded she was that he thought he belonged there.

  She loved him more after Elizabeth was born; she loved how he became her family in a way she already felt he was, but was now made manifest on the beautiful face of their baby. She hadn’t known how much it would mean, the way she could see his face in Elizabeth’s, and her own, and, most exquisitely, a new, perfect face, unlike either of theirs in its abject curiosity, its constant wonder, the most marvelous face she had ever known.

  That she had harmed this face remained a shock to her, offset now by the only drug she needed, the rush of love she felt when her daughter nursed, not only for Elizabeth, but for all the world, an openheartedness she could not remember feeling before Elizabeth’s birth. The rush of it didn’t overcome her as much as it had the first two months, when she would go slack-jawed at letdown, unable to form words, mushmouthed and struck dumb, her brain shut off, her whole body a beating neon heart of oxytocin. Even now, with the blank white of Elizabeth’s bandage blazing up at her, she was awash in the relief of her daughter’s hunger, her whole self for this moment sated.

  Lainey switched Elizabeth to her other breast, touched lightly the clean cheek, and looked at Adam again. The way he leaned in the doorway, his hip at a jaunty, satisfied angle. He looked sexy.

  They hadn’t had sex since Elizabeth was born, had tried once, too early, and it hurt. Since then, Lainey had had, for the first time in her life, zero interest. She knew it would pass, hadn’t been worried, had barely noticed, nor looked up from her daughter’s face for long enough to notice Adam making a feline posture like this, if he had, broadcasting his sexual viability in some way that she recognized but to which she could not respond. His body appealed to her in an abstract way, but it seemed garish for him to stand this way in this place, and she suggested they take a walk.

  When Elizabeth finished nursing, Lainey wound her up in the light linen wrap she favored in the heat. She felt a warmth toward Margaret for knowing to pack this. As Lainey lifted her baby, she went to kiss her covered cheek, stopped short before her lips grazed the bandage, whipped her neck back so fast that Elizabeth mewled, looked quizzical. Lainey had kissed that cheek a million times, so many times, touched it with no more hesitation than she might her own cheek. Perhaps this porousness had been part of the problem. She didn’t know, and she wouldn’t find out in this place, the doctors concerned primarily with convincing her that the cocktail of antianxiety medications in their preferred brands were safe for nursing, sure that her resistance was part of the postpartum panic that they believed landed her there.

  Though it was a bit early, Elizabeth only ever napped when worn by Lainey, and Lainey hoped it would extend their visit if her daughter fell asleep.

  Outside, the pine trees were already baking. She asked Adam how Elizabeth had napped the previous day. He tried wearing her for walking naps in the city sometimes, but she usually stayed alert, eyes wide in wonder, babbling as her papa tried different paces, brisk stride, slow stroll, hip sashay—anything to jostle her into the rhythm she required. Adam would return joking that he’d given the baby another tour of the neighborhood, pass Elizabeth to Lainey, who would wrap her up and go back outside.

  He hesitated. “She napped with Margaret.”

  Lainey swallowed a sob. Elizabeth was still awake, and she didn’t want to upset her anymore than she already had, her baby who, before all this, had never slept in a separate bed, let alone building.

  “No, I’m glad! I’m glad she napped. Glad that she feels so comfortable with Margaret. That’s,” she struggled not to cry, “that’s lucky.”

  They walked in silence, the sh-sh-sh of the sprinklers and Elizabeth’s little birdsong babbles the only sounds.

  “Did she wear her?” Lainey could hear in her voice a rising panic so inappropriate for the inquiry, as though she was asking what Adam’s lover wore for their latest rendezvous.

  “She did,” he said. “She borrowed my Ergo.”

  “With the insert? I think she’s still too light to go without,” Lainey said. “It can do permanent damage to the hips.” She adjusted Elizabeth now, sticky already against her, the heat oppressive in proportion to the frigid air-conditioning indoors.

  “It was too stuffy for the insert,” Adam said. “Let’s not fight about this—no, scratch that, it actually feels really good to fight about this,” he said, and offered her the smile that always steadied her, encompassing, authentic, easy. “It’s kind of a relief to fight about this.”

  The day before, they had argued about what happened, in her room with the door closed, while Elizabeth nursed. He’d said that he was going to talk with one of the doctors after she finished nursing, and he wanted to bring Elizabeth.

  “So what, I can’t be alone with her ever again?”

  “I didn’t say that! But you have to understand why I,” he lowered his voice, “why I am nervous about that.”

  “But you understand I would never hurt her,” she said, and he was silent. “I would never intentionally hurt her. Adam, you know that, don’t you? You know that’s true! It was an accident, I don’t, I would never hurt her.”

  “But you did! And you don’t seem to get that. You can’t accidentally”—he stopped himself, looked to the door as though the police might burst in—“do something like that. Some other force possessed you.”

  The thing Adam would never understand was that it was not some other force, but the same force, the same love so overpowering it teetered into destruction. He hadn’t birthed a baby, he didn’t know, how Elizabeth had torn out of her, left her gaping, bloody, raw, how every creation is an act of destruction, how the bite was borne out of desire to show Elizabeth how deep her love for her ran, how vast, how endless. They can lock me up forever, they can bury me alive, she wanted to tell her daughter, and the love I have for you will endure. Claw its way out of anything tear down the sky upend the earth erupt from inside its molten core make a black hole of everything, our love the first burst of light.

  Lainey understood better now why people wanted to destroy women. In an offhand way she’d always agreed with this notion, that men did so in part out of jealousy or rage that they couldn’t grow a human inside their bodies, but she knew now that it was both simpler and more complicated than this, that it was not just their rage and impotence and jealousy, but their awareness, even half formed, that a woman knew something about the connection between destruction and creation that they could never understand, and so some swatted and swatted, beat and raped and strangled women, Lainey knew, out of this impotent desperation to do what she did at that very moment: nurse her baby, give her baby life with her own body, the one that she undid, bled dry, with that same act. This didn’t forgive it, and nothing forgave her, it made them worse, really, both the violent men and herself, because with the bite she became like them, greedy beyond reason, wanting so badly to show love, to fight loss, that she’d harmed Elizabeth.

  All this but also something physical. She could not remember anything more than the usual nibble, but she had tried in these locked-away days to know, to imagine, to see herself into that horrible scene. Her jaw must have opened, unhinged like a prehistoric beast’s, and since she hadn’t consciously signaled it, it must have done so on its own, out of time: animal, energy, fat. Not a bone, not a thought. Just the pull to bite, to consume, to have. To swallow Elizabeth the same way it seemed some days that Elizabeth wanted to swallow her, to crawl back inside her, yes, maybe, but that seemed too simple a shorthand for something that went beyond bodies, not one insid
e the other as in sex or as in utero, just one.

  “It went too far. I know I went too far. But I didn’t mean it,” she said, stifled another cry. “It was an accident.”

  “Lainey, do you really not get that what you did is . . . is psychotic?”

  “Now I’m a psychopath?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t have to! Look around. Only thing missing is the straitjacket.” She had waved at her small room, the few half-hearted attempts at making it homey only highlighting how bloodless and sterile a space it was. “When can I go home, Adam. Let me come home.”

  She’d cried then, while Elizabeth had nursed on the right side, the bit cheek concealed, tucked against Lainey’s body. She could feel the tuft of gauze there, the itch. But she could also tell herself it had never happened, and for the length of Elizabeth’s suckling, she could believe it.

  Now, outside on their walk, Lainey looked down at the bandage, a tiny smudge of ointment glistening in the sun.

  “Can I see it?” she asked. The day before, Adam had denied this request, insisting that he’d just changed the bandage and didn’t want to expose the wound.

  Now, Lainey pointed to a bench in the shade.

  “Let’s sit here,” she said. “Let me look at it.”

  “Alice told us to remove the dressing as little as possible,” he said.

  “I know that, Adam,” Lainey said. “But I need to see. What I’ve done.”

  “It’s so hot,” Adam said. “And we’re outside. I don’t want, I don’t know, a bug to . . .” He sighed. “All right.”

  Why should he be the only one to have to look at it? The face he made before he followed her to the bench was maybe her first realization that she had done this to him, too.

  * * *

  • • •

  After they left she could only think of the wound she’d made, how it was still so wet, and angry, and new. The start of scabbing made a thin dark thread of dried blood along the edges of the two pink crescents, each with one neat, tiny stitch. Her cheek was so small and, away from it, it was easy for the wound to grow in Lainey’s mind, open wider and wider still, swallow her daughter’s face, as Lainey, herself, some version of her, had attempted to do.

  What kind of demented person did that to a baby, any baby, let alone her own? Lainey had thought of little else, and still she couldn’t reconcile it with anything she knew about herself. She tried to remember that missing afternoon, both a lifetime and a split second ago, could not even insert herself into a movie version of that scene, forced to take Adam’s word that it was she who had done this, could not remember anything in her teeth, or, God help her, on her tongue or in her throat. Something in her body and jaw had acted without her mind’s consent, brought her teeth down on the world and sliced them both into some other dimension somehow, a needle skip, a parallel universe, this is the version of you that went off the rails. In this time that you were so in your life, you somehow fell through it, down into darkness, through the earth and its atmosphere, back down into your daughter’s sunny nursery, your husband screaming in the doorway, sounds like you have never heard.

  She tested her teeth on her forearm, tried to bite, failed to even break skin. Her breasts were already growing full again, the tingling needles in her underarms insisting that she pump. She hooked herself up, quarantined cattle, and listened to the machine’s chant, mon-stuhr, mon-stuhr, mon-stuhr, the new word it had learned with this recent increase in use, an accusation she could not deny but that she tried to reshape in her mind, let it sound like, let it be: mother, mother, mother.

  Chapter 48

  Their third night at the motel, Adam came to Ji Sun’s door again, whiskey bottle in one hand and monitor in the other.

  The night before he had done the same, stood there in his stupid khakis, looking both sheepish and ravenous. There was no storm, no excuse. After they spent the second night together, taking their time with each other’s bodies, not rushed as they had been the first night, she had been forced to move him into the category with most other men she knew. Now he had betrayed Lainey. She had, too, but part of her was certain of the irony that Lainey would be the only one who might understand why they’d needed to do this, might not even feel betrayed, but grateful in these hollow, desperate days that they’d found some balm against their despair. This was too far, she knew, but still she allowed herself to entertain believing it.

  The second night, after, he hadn’t darted off so quickly. They’d lain together on the starchy sheets and turned on the television, watched a reality show that Ji Sun had become hooked on during the stay.

  “That can never happen again,” Adam said.

  “Never,” she said.

  “Never,” he said. And they traded more nevers like I love yous, like thank-yous, like I knows.

  But here he was.

  “Never,” she said, and she let him in in the same movement that she began to remove his clothes. She wanted to make the mistake again. As long as they were here, in this motel, where they had already done it, she reasoned, it was part of the same mistake.

  They didn’t say much else to one another, but she was amazed by the way in which their bodies continued a conversation they had been having for years, not halting, but curious, not hurried, but desperate. When would they know enough? How could they stop asking now, after all this?

  “I have to be able to talk to you,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I can’t lose your friendship because of this. Your respect, fine. But not your friendship.” He gave a slyer version of the smile she knew him for, open and easy, affable but not naive. This smile unnerved her in the same way his glance at the monitor had that first night, in that it was a nod to an awareness of the circumstances outside of this room. They fell asleep undressed, in each other’s arms, and when Ji Sun next woke, Adam was still naked, on the edge of the bed, phone to his ear.

  The first light was creeping in the window, his face blue in the glow of his phone. The panic in his posture took the last of the sleep from her, and she sat up straight.

  “What is it? It’s Lainey?”

  He tossed the phone down, pulled on his pants, and nodded.

  “They didn’t say, they didn’t say. They just said to come right away. On the message. Fuck. Oh fuck. My God.” He tripped trying to put his shirt on, knocked his head against the back of a chair. “Oh, my God, Lainey.”

  Ji Sun was frozen in place, sheet wrapped around her like a shield.

  “We have to go,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Like that, she would go with him. Of course she would go with him! She unwound the sheet from her body and sat naked in the bed, willed herself to stand.

  He raced back to his room while Ji Sun got dressed, collected the keys from Margaret, and told her he would call as soon as he knew more. He wouldn’t bring Elizabeth until he knew what waited there.

  The sun leaked its pale white light into the purple of the horizon as they sped to the facility in silence. Adam parked half on the sidewalk and raced inside. Visiting hours had not yet begun, and Ji Sun was alone in the small sitting room. She texted with Margaret and Alice, told them that something had happened with Lainey, she didn’t know what. She wanted to call, but couldn’t risk being outside when news came, and didn’t want to talk in this space, so near to whatever had happened, but knowing nothing.

  She was sick with fear. Why hadn’t they protected Lainey? Why had they taken Elizabeth from her? Why hadn’t they brought her somewhere better, somewhere with more to recommend it than its discretion, its ease of use? If Lainey was dead, Ji Sun would die, too, right in this room, she was sure of it.

  When Adam returned, she might have seen on his face that Lainey was alive. But her vision was blurred by pain and fear. She needed him to say it.

  “She’s okay,” he said.

  “Is? Did she?” She choked
out the question that had been waiting there.

  “She bit herself,” Adam answered. He held a clipboard in one hand, and he put the other on her shoulder.

  “Oh, God,” Ji Sun said, and a hoarse laugh came up from her throat. She put her hand to her mouth, tried to catch the laughter she couldn’t stop, dry barks tumbling loose. “I’m sorry,” she said, still laughing, “I’m just relieved. I don’t want her to die.”

  “I don’t either,” Adam said, with a look of surprise so earnest that Ji Sun saw it had not occurred to him as a true possibility before this moment.

  “Come on,” he said, leading her by the shoulder out into the hall. “She wants to see you.”

  Ji Sun was afraid to go in, afraid to fail. Afraid she would still stink of Adam’s sex, afraid she would offer poor comfort, afraid she wouldn’t find the right words, any words. She wished Margaret were there. Margaret knew how to comfort, how to grab a trembling hand and hold it in both her warm hands, how to throw her arms around people at the first quiver of their bottom lip. She called them oh darling, oh love, oh sweet one; she always started the rounds of I love you that they traded when they parted ways. She never hesitated to nurture, though Ji Sun had called upon her less in this regard since Connecticut. After the twins arrived, whatever happened there had been shunted into ancient history, part of an “unhealthy period” in Margaret’s life, as though her mistake had been caused by a vitamin D deficiency or not enough centering yoga. In recollecting her own unhealthy periods, Ji Sun saw herself like an undersea creature, all her sumptuous blacks sodden, her hair tentacles, reaching out to try to strangle anyone within reach, and if no one came near enough, wrap back around her own neck. But there were always people near enough.

  That’s who they were to one another—the ones willing to reach without dwelling on the risk. The ones who would enter the room when it reeked of despair. The ones who would not turn away.